Nobel Laureate Richter to step down as
director of SLAC

Burton Richter, Nobel Prize laureate and a
pioneer of the colliders that now dominate
high-energy physics, announced today that he will
step down Aug. 31, 1999, as director of the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center after 15 years
in the position.

Richter, 67, is the Paul Pigott Professor in
the Physical Sciences and will remain on the
Stanford faculty, conducting research and working
on science policy. He also will take office as
president of the International Union of Pure and
Applied Physics.

"All the world knows Burt Richter's
qualities as a physicist because they were
recognized by the Nobel Prize," said
Stanford President Gerhard Casper. "Stanford
and I know his qualities as an extraordinarily
able, dedicated, and tenacious director of the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and as a
citizen of the university. He has always
performed with good judgment, integrity and
candor. My almost seven years of working with
Burt have been thoroughly rewarding."

Casper said that he would begin the process of
selecting the next director of SLAC, which is
operated by the university for the U.S.
Department of Energy.

Martha Krebs, director of the Office of
Science at the Department of Energy, said that
Richter has been a "leader among
leaders" of DOE facilities and has helped
provide direction for many of the labs, not just
SLAC.

"I can always depend on Burt to speak the
truth," she said. "When he's not
charming, he is winning."

Richter won the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics,
along with Samuel Ting of MIT, for pioneering
work at Stanford on the development of a new kind
of particle collider, which resulted in the
discovery of the Psi/J particle. He came to
Stanford as a post-doctoral student in 1956,
directly from getting his Ph.D. from MIT, and
rapidly moved up the ladder: assistant professor
in 1960; associate professor in 1963, the year he
joined SLAC; and professor in 1967. He took over
as director of SLAC in 1984 upon the retirement
of Wolfgang Panofsky.

"A lab director's job is very different
from that of a scientist," Richter said.
"The job is to get resources for other
people to do great science ‚ and to keep them
moving in the direction you think is most
productive. You must always make sure that there
is a menu of options for the lab and its users so
they can remain on the frontier of science. I
think I've done a good job of that."

Part of the job has been dealing with budgets,
both good and bad, and constant travel to
Washington, D.C. Asked if he approached his
change of roles with relief, sadness or a sense
of freedom, Richter responded, "Some of all
of those."

More important, he said, was the SLAC he would
leave to his successor.

""I've always believed,"
Richter said, "that the lab has three time
scales: now, when you must ensure high quality;
the next five years, when you are preparing the
tools for the next wave of work; and 10 to 15
years from now, when you have to be doing the
R&D to be positioned for whatever science
needs, and finances and politics will allow.

"We have a full menu of new opportunities
in all three time scales. The B-Factory is just
starting up and is going to be the premier
facility in the lab for the next five years. The
synchrotron light source is beginning an overhaul
that will improve its performance significantly
and stimulate valuable research for some time. We
have, in the R&D phase, a linear collider 10
times the size of our current one. Faculty
efforts to do non-accelerator physics ‚ for
example, particle physics in space ‚ are getting
off the ground, so to speak. And we are beginning
R&D to bring together the technology of the
linear accelerator of the high-energy physics
division with X-ray techniques of the synchrotron
division to make X-ray lasers that will
revolutionize fields from chemistry to biology to
medicine.

"So, all three time lines are in good
shape," he said, "and it is a good
moment for someone new to take over, see them all
through, and prepare for the next round."

Sidney Drell, SLAC's deputy director emeritus
‚ as well as a world-renowned theoretical
physicist and adviser to several U.S. presidents
on the comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty ‚
said Richter's successor would start from a
strong position.

"Under Burt's direction, SLAC has
excelled at research fields it has helped
advance, especially the linear collider Burt
pioneered," he said. "He also has built
a vision for the future with the newly dedicated
B Factory and ongoing efforts, in collaboration
with other American institutions and Japanese
physicists, for new frontiers with
electron-positron colliders on the ground and the
large aperture gamma-ray telescope in
space."

Richter's role as a builder of the tools of
high-energy physics began in the 1950s, when he
joined with Gerard O'Neill, W.C. Barber and
Bernard Gittelman to construct the first
colliding beam device. "It took us about six
years to make the beams behave properly,"
Richter said, but when they did, the device
became the ancestor of all the colliding beam
storage rings to follow. All high-energy physics
accelerators now being developed are colliding
beam devices.

As director, Richter has overseen the
conversion of SLAC's own two-mile-long
accelerator from a machine that fired particles
at a fixed target into a linear collider that
brought two beams into head-on collisions. The
conversion was begun in 1983, with the first
physics experiments conducted in 1989.

Richter said much of SLAC's success ‚ which
includes work that led to Nobel Prizes for him,
for Richard Taylor in 1990 and for Martin Perl in
1995 ‚ is a direct result of its being a part of
Stanford University.

"SLAC is very different from any other
federal lab because it is integrated into the
university," Richter said. "We have 35
Stanford faculty members as part of our lab, and
many more using our facilities. We are a
national, a world, facility ‚ at last count, we
had 2,800 users, and of those, only about 10
percent are from Stanford. To me, however, for a
lab like this to be effective, it has to have
leadership inside to develop opportunities for
the broad user community. And SLAC has always
been a leader thanks to the faculty and staff
involved in our programs."

Among the opportunities SLAC developed under
Richter's directorship was the integration of the
Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lab in 1994.

"With Burt's strong support, SSRL's
capabilities grew enormously once it became a
SLAC division," said Arthur Bienenstock,
former director of SSRL and now associate
director for science for the federal Office of
Science and Technology Policy.

In the future, Richter said, very big science
projects will require partnerships that extend
beyond national borders.

"All big-machine physics projects,
including our own dreams of a next-generation
linear collider, will likely have to be
international projects," he said. "And
international projects are difficult. They
require not only scientific skills but political
skills. You must get governments together, and
governments don't always want to get
together."